Jimmy Akin

SDG here with a non-election related post on some non-election coolness. (Pre-election coolness, actually, but I wanted to wait till now to blog about it.)

Incidentally, if you read the NCRegister.com blog, which I’ve cited in a number of recent posts, you may already be aware of this.

First, though, I just have to geek out a bit. Like many film critics writing today, I grew up watching Roger Ebert discuss movies with Gene Siskel on “At the Movies.” I remember watching them discuss certain movies in the early 1980s (e.g., Raiders, Superman II, Return of the Jedi).

I have the idea that the paper I delivered as a paperboy carried Ebert’s written reviews, and that I was reading them sometime in the early to mid-1980s. I may have I bought book editions of his reviews in college in the late 1980s; certainly by the time I had Internet access in the mid-1990s I was reading him every week, along with a few other favorites.

As an inveterate reader of all sorts of writing and an aspiring writer myself, I quickly came to appreciate Ebert’s literary skill and engaging voice as well as his critical insights. In many cases I enjoyed his reviews more than the movies he wrote about. In 2000, when I began writing faith-informed reviews and posting them on the earliest incarnation of Decent Films, Ebert was one of the touchstones I looked to in finding a voice of my own.

He was, and is, simply The Man.

One early piece I wrote that first year of writing film criticism was an essay on Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It seemed to me an obvious test case of the style of writing I wanted to do — that is, to do film writing that was equally intelligible to my target religious audience and also to non-religious readers. (My model here was a writer even more profoundly influential on me than Ebert, C. S. Lewis.)

Few movies seemed as deeply polarizing to the two groups of readers than Last Temptation, so if I could make myself intelligible to these two groups of readers on this film, I could probably do it on any film.

I’m sure I read Ebert’s original review of Last Temptation, in which he argues that the film is not blasphemous, in preparation for writing my own. I didn’t quote it, although I did cite another review he wrote in 2000, for Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.

I never expected my Last Temptation essay to get much attention. I naively thought the controversy over that film was a closed chapter, and my essay was fundamentally written to satisfy myself that it could be done, and for the sake of a few readers who might care to look at it.

Much to my surprise, it has over the years consistently been among the most widely read essays at Decent Films. Feedback from readers has been fairly regular and all over the map (as I discussed a bit in a recent Decent Films reader mail column).

More recently, I’ve learned that my essay has been cited in more than one essay in a recent book on Last Temptation, Scandalizing Jesus. (One of the essays citing me was written by my friend and fellow critic Peter Chattaway; another, “Imaging the Divine,” is by Lloyd Baugh, whom I’ve never met.)

Anyway, last week I learned that my Last Temptation essay had been cited by Ebert himself in a new essay on Last Temptation that appeared both in his online “Great Films” series and also in Ebert’s new book Scorsese by Ebert.

As it happens, this isn’t the first time I’ve been name-checked by Ebert. He first quoted me in his review of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, regarding Gibson’s portrayal of the Jewish leaders. Just think, if controversial Jesus movies were a Hollywood staple, I might have gotten a guest spot on Ebert’s show.

What’s more, this time around Ebert credits my essay with persuading him that, in spite of his arguments to the contrary nearly two decades ago, Last Temptation is in fact “technically blasphemous.” He adds that he no longer thinks this matters, but still it’s a startling confirmation that I succeeded at least partly in what I set out to do in that essay. Here’s what he wrote:

The film is indeed technically blasphemous. I have been persuaded of this by a thoughtful essay by Steven D. Greydanus of the National Catholic Register, a mainstream writer who simply and concisely explains why. I mention this only to argue that a film can be blasphemous, or anything else that the director desires, and we should only hope that it be as good as the filmmaker can make it, and convincing in its interior purpose. Certainly useful things can be said about Jesus Christ by presenting him in a non-orthodox way. There is a long tradition of such revisionism, including the foolishness of The Da Vinci Code. The story by Kazantzakis, Scorsese and Schrader grapples with the central mystery of Jesus, that he was both God and man, and uses the freedom of fiction to explore the implications of such a paradox.

Now, I think that Ebert’s new essay offers a lot of insight into the film. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that it is right to say that it uses “the freedom of fiction to explore the central mystery of Jesus.” I think that Last Temptation uses the central mystery of Jesus as a metaphor, and that what the film is really exploring is the human experience of duality. Screenwriter Paul Shrader acknowledges this in an interesting 2002 interview at AVClub.com in which he acknowledges the film’s blasphemy:

Actually, the whole issue of blasphemy is interesting, because technically, the film is blasphemous, but not in the way people think. The film uses Jesus Christ as a metaphor for spirituality. And, under a technical definition of blasphemy, if Jesus is regarded as something other than holy God incarnate, you’re being blasphemous. And so the film takes the character of Jesus and uses Him as a metaphor for our spiritual feelings and says, “What if this happened, what if He yielded to temptation?”

I think Ebert makes essentially the same point when he says, “What makes ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ one of his great films is not that it is true about Jesus but that it is true about Scorsese.” Be that as it may, where I differ from Ebert and other fans of the film is that, for me, my ability to enter the filmmaker’s world simply encounters an immovable obstacle when it comes to a Jesus movie that, however true it may be about the filmmaker, is so radically untrue about Jesus. I am just unable to go with Jesus as metaphor, for precisely the reason that Shrader indicates. I appreciate Ebert’s lament that “the direction, the writing, the acting, the images or Peter Gabriel’s harsh, mournful music” have been ignored by many writers — but for me that’s all beside the point. As I wrote in my essay:

Past a certain point, objectionability obliterates all hope or desire of approaching a work as art or entertainment. No level of production values or technically proficient filmmaking could make it worthwhile to watch a movie that indulged in child pornography, or that relentlessly celebrated the Holocaust, or that overtly romanticized the degradation and abasement of women. Cross a certain line, and message overwhelms medium, substance overwhelms style, what you have to say drowns out how you might be saying it.

Anyway, that’s how I saw it eight years ago. That this essay — one of my oldest pieces, an essay I wrote when I was first beginning to feel my way into the world of writing about film and faith — would receive such attention at this late date is both gratifying and humbling. I can’t even imagine how I would have felt back in 2000 writing the piece if you had told me that Ebert, whom I quoted in that piece, would one day be citing me in turn.

That the piece appears in Ebert’s Scorsese book is even more gratifying. As Nick Alexander suggested over at ArtsAndFaith.com, it seems likely that Scorsese has read Ebert’s book, so maybe he now knows that the movie is blasphemous, too.

Ebert’s new Last Temptation essay

Ebert’s Passion of the Christ essay

My Last Temptation essay

NCRegister.com blog post